Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

Auvik is our primary network management tool. We utilize it to ensure all systems and remote sites are seamlessly connected to our central office. While its core function is network management, we leverage its capabilities for deep-dive technical analysis when needed.

In our setup, Auvik itself is deployed in the cloud. I'm not sure if they have a hybrid or on-premises option available. However, we do require a collector, which is a virtual server we own. This server stores data that Auvik accesses for network management and discovery. If the collector goes down, Auvik won't be able to report any information to the cloud. Although I manage everything through the cloud interface, I never need to log into the collector itself.

The UI can be easily navigated by new users. 

Auvik offers a network map for improved visibility. However, I'm unsure if our current setup allows us to take full advantage of this feature. While I can access the map, it sometimes displays inaccurate connections, with devices either incorrectly shown as connected or missing entirely. While my initial suspicion is a fault on our end, I believe the overall concept of the map is good and has potential.

Using the network map is easy. Auvik has a helpful key that explains what each line represents and what different devices look like on the map.

The network map provides full visibility without the need for other tools.

Auvik helps decrease our Mean Time to Resolution and allows us to spend less time on setup and issue resolution.

I like how Auvik gives us a quick overview of the overall situation. With a glance at the main page, we can see the most utilized sites, the overall bandwidth usage, and even identify the top bandwidth consumers. The color-coded map with green for online and red for offline sites is an intuitive way to get a high-level picture at a glance.

I requested that Auvik implement an alarm system to notify me immediately of any disruptions or anomalies. While email alerts are currently in place, I believe audible notifications would be more effective in attracting my attention.

I appreciate the notification that they're addressing the recent service outage. While I understand being kept informed, multiple emails for every impacted device seem excessive. It would be ideal if notifications were consolidated into a single update once the issue is resolved. Hopefully, they'll have it fixed soon.

I have been using Auvik for one and a half years.

Overall, I'd rate Auvik's stability a solid nine out of ten. While occasional downtime is inevitable, they're smart about scheduling it for minimal impact - typically early Saturday mornings when most users are offline. Of course, like any technology, unforeseen issues can arise, but these are rare and Auvik keeps users well-informed throughout any downtime occurrences. Infrequent hiccups aside, Auvik has proven remarkably reliable.

Auvik is very flexible and can scale to anything we have.

The technical support has been able to resolve all our issues promptly.

Positive

Previously, I used SolarWinds, which worked reasonably well. However, after experiencing a security breach, I decided to move on due to concerns about continued vulnerabilities. Although SolarWinds may have taken corrective measures since then, I opted for Auvik. My primary driver for this change was the map functionality. While SolarWinds displayed individual sites and color-coded lines depicting connectivity, highlighting downed circuits with red, Auvik's map features are tied to external providers like Leaflet or OpenStreetMap. This limits customization, preventing me from using my background image and manually connecting elements. While longitude and latitude coordinates are available, I find this approach less intuitive for my needs and potentially confusing for the general user base. Additionally, SolarWinds' technical support proved unhelpful after the breach, refusing to assist with resolving issues related to device recognition. This lack of support contrasted starkly with Auvik's customer service, which readily helped me ensure all my devices communicated seamlessly with the platform. The responsive customer service led me to switch to Auvik.

The initial deployment with Auvik's support was straightforward. They provided clear guidance and assistance to get our systems up and running. While we assumed ownership gradually after mastering the basics, Auvik stayed readily available for ongoing support. Whenever we encountered hurdles during implementation, their tech team promptly cleared the roadblocks. To finalize the process, Auvik conducted a comprehensive review, ensuring everything functions flawlessly. The smooth deployment took a month with moderate effort, and it could have been significantly faster if needed. Me and my system admin completed the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of an Auvik technician.

The initial offer was high, but I was able to negotiate it down. The final price is quite competitive compared to other options. Auvik offers a robust feature set that can be further expanded with add-ons. I'm particularly interested in their inventory asset program, which appeals to me because it conveniently bundles all the software we need. While I'm leaning towards adding it eventually, additional funding would be necessary. Furthermore, Auvik offers an optional "Traffic Insights" add-on that provides comprehensive data on all connected devices. It's important to note that these add-ons come at an additional cost on top of the basic Auvik license.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten.

Network management can be a bit of a plunge. We dive in, test the waters, and then see if it works for us. We didn't fully grasp the benefits of Auvik until we had it up and running for about six months to truly understand its impact. One thing I've noticed in the past year or two since we adopted Auvik, is that they were initially rough around the edges on some things. But they've stepped up their game since then. Their upcoming release sounds particularly promising, especially for remote desktop functionality. We currently use other software for that, but Auvik's new feature will allow us to do it directly within their platform, which I'm excited about.

We were able to get Auvik up and running and see the value quicker than we did for SolarWinds.

Maintenance is occasionally necessary. If we add or remove devices, adjustments are required to ensure proper system recognition. However, when no changes are made, the system functions autonomously daily.

To avoid initial frustration, it's crucial to ensure proper device accountability and the ability to identify elements like SNMP. Verify everything is running as expected. Auvik's lack of visibility might stem from our recent router replacements and mass equipment installation within the past six months. It's important to remember that if our configuration isn't accurate, Auvik is not at fault. Therefore, having everything properly set up beforehand would be the best approach.

I was looking for a solution that we could use to catalog and keep track of our inventory. I thought about using Auvik in our lab environment to see how it would work for tracking inventory in a production setting.

Auvik's ease of use has bettered our operations by allowing us to add or remove platforms as they get added in or get deprecated, improving quality of life.

The solution was able to integrate with most of our platforms. There were a couple of vendors that were not added in yet, but it wasn't an issue.

It would be beneficial having a single integrated platform for our organization but no solution is able to fully integrate with every vendor. We work with what we have.

If I can deploy the solution into production, it would be beneficial because we can also upload documentation to the Auvik page so we can have quick access for our support team. If our organization leverages Auvik to pull down documentation on the specific vendors as well as just our internal processes, workflow, and troubleshooting approach, Auvik would improve our organization.

Auvik helps us keep our device inventory up to date. After adding all the necessary information, the quickest way I could see the code versions running was by querying the SNPs.

In the long run, the time Auvik would save us quickly pulling the information required to keep our inventory up to date would be a lifesaver. 

Using the monitoring and management functions of Auvik is easy. The solution is straightforward to set up. It communicates well with the SNP and some of the cloud platforms via API keys.

I like the view Auvik offers to help visualize the network mapping/topology for our organization. When we have a large deployment with tens or hundreds of devices, the view can get a little cluttered. The fact that the view is there and we can zoom in and zoom out still makes it valuable to see how things are interconnected and laid out.

I am sure that if we moved forward with the solution it would affect our IT team's visibility into our remote and distributed networks globally, but for evaluation purposes, I was the only one using Auvik.

The fact that Auvik can be accessed anywhere is a good benefit. Not having to use a VPN to access the solution is advantageous. If I'm at a customer site or I'm on vacation, and I need to pull information up because I get an email or a phone call from somebody at work, having Auvik is beneficial because it is cloud-based compared to on-prem network monitoring solutions. 

Auvik mostly supports large vendors such as the Cisco Aruba networks, Meraki, and Extreme Networks. They have the ability to tie into Meraki's dashboard, which is a subsidiary of Cisco. We're using some of the Ruckus hardware. If Auvik can add in some of the smaller vendors to be able to work with their products or even Extreme Networks' cloud platform, that would be beneficial for our organization. 

I have been using Auvik for a couple of weeks.

It is stable and we have not encountered any problems.

I added a Meraki platform with 20,000 access points to test Auvik's scalability. The platform accepted the additional access points without issue and was able to handle the additional load.

The technical support was good. They responded quickly to my question and helped me resolve the issue.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I had to set up a VM in our network that acted as the collector of the data. I didn't read the directions well enough myself and tried to install Auvik on a newer version of Ubuntu. Once I realized my error I moved the solution back down to the correct version and it was up and running within a few minutes. 

The deployment took around two hours. We deployed the solution in a single location for one of our departments to conduct initial testing and proof of concept.

The implementation was out-of-the-box and completed in-house.

It seems that the pricing is a little higher than some of the other solutions, but it also offers more value and data. The pricing shown on the website goes up to 40 devices and for anything higher, we are required to contact the vendor.

We also evaluated PRTG Network Monitor.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

We need a better system for tracking inventory and assets in our production world. Currently, we have an Icinga instance that is not suited for this purpose.

The biggest challenge I faced with Auvik was configuring SNP for devices that did not have it pre-configured because some versions need to talk to the crawler or collector. Once configured, we can add as many devices as we can and view the data Auvik feeds back to us.

We are demoing Auvik to see if it makes sense for us to implement. As a managed service provider, we are utilizing it to monitor our clients' networks, perform inventory of devices, and diagnose and troubleshoot network issues.

I wouldn't say that we couldn't do business without Auvik, but it's a way for us to be more profitable because it cuts down on the total hours it takes to service our clients. We gain efficiency in areas that, otherwise, would have been manual tasks. We're no longer spending a lot of time manually digging into each network device when there is an issue. We can easily track down where something is happening.

We've benefited from better efficiency as well as from better clarity into issues, sometimes even before they happen. Before a client is calling or beating down our doors saying things are down, we usually have an alert from Auvik saying there's a problem. When I'm able to pick up the phone and say, "Oh yeah, I'm already aware that you have a network outage," that is very helpful.

We have a more accurate view of everything going on within our clients' networks. Our clients are located across the United States and being able to easily view what's going on in their networks, and have alerting on top of that, is very helpful. That visibility is very important because of the way we are leveraging Auvik, which is for detecting and alerting us about issues before a client contacts us about them. Auvik is how we're being notified when there's an issue, ideally in a proactive manner. We can remediate the issue before any downtime is noticed by a customer. It has helped to decrease our mean time to resolution.

It also keeps device inventories up to date. Ensuring an accurate inventory is one of the key components of our service to customers. Our business model is focused on consumption, so we need to have an accurate count of our customers' devices so that we can give them an accurate bill. Knowing that we have 100 percent accuracy on what devices are stuck to their networks is critical. The fact that Auvik does it automatically cuts down on the time we spend managing that aspect. It saves us a couple of hours per month per engineer. The customer is happy, our billing team is happy, and we don't have to spend cycles doing it. It's just a triple-win situation.

Also, because Auvik is in the cloud, we can troubleshoot with it from anywhere. Whereas, when dealing with an on-prem solution, if something's wrong with the internet coming in and I'm remote, I can't troubleshoot it or fix it. It's a different methodology and I feel that it is Auvik's special sauce. Because it's built around the cloud, it allows for a better, holistic view of what's going on and helps identify where the problems are. If you're on a broken network and you're trying to work on that network, it's very difficult.

The inventory and audit features are the most valuable. We are able to get a good map of everything in a network. Some clients don't know what they have or own, and having a tool that can compile all of that is a beneficial aspect of the solution. It cuts down on the number of hours required to search for things, because if you don't know what you don't know, you can miss things. Auvik is truly going to discover everything that is connected to the network. It gives us peace of mind and cuts down on the number of hours it takes to onboard a client.

We usually devote approximately an hour of time to onboarding a client environment. What that entails is gathering some basic information about passwords, SNMP credentials, et cetera. Being able to spend just an hour to get everything captured is pretty effective.

It is incredibly easy to use when it comes to its monitoring and management functions.

And it's incredibly important, given our work as a managed service provider, to have a single pane of glass environment. That is very crucial to being able to identify and diagnose issues with a network and fix them promptly. We don't have to log in to 15 different devices to track down how things are connected.

We've used different tools in the past for mapping network topology and we've also done it manually. The fact that Auvik is able to create a network map that is accurate and to do it automatically with its collector is supremely helpful. 

Since I last used the product about eight months ago, all of the things that I had complaints about have been fixed by Auvik.

One thing I would like to see is more functionality designed for managed services, such as multi-tenancy, to better manage things from an MSP perspective.

I have used Auvik for three different employers. I began using it four to five years ago.

I have never seen an outage with it. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, which is to be on all the time.

It scales very well. You just install collectors on the different segments of your network where you need them, and it pieces everything else together in the background. It's really as scalable as you need it to be.

I have only had to deal with tech support once and they were able to identify what my issue was and referred me to their documentation platform for the resolution. If I had bothered to just read the documentation first, I wouldn't have needed to even have opened a ticket because they already had my issue fully documented. 

It was excellent support because not only did they know the answer, but they had proactively documented it and had it available even before I needed to ask the question. It was a good experience.

Positive

We used multiple applications for managing our networks before Auvik. Having switched, we are saving a lot of time, at least 10 hours per client-onboarding.

At my previous employer, we were using SolarWinds. The main and direct reason we made the switch is that SolarWinds had a gigantic breach. We've tested and talked through the security of Auvik's backend and we feel that it meets the various security controls that we needed to have implemented.

SolarWinds was, if I recall correctly, double the cost of Auvik. We gained cost savings and security by switching to Auvik. Also, when we were using SolarWinds, we had to have a dedicated SolarWinds server, whereas with Auvik, we do not need to have a server, we just have to have a collector device. And that device can be a "potato computer." We don't need a lot of resources or compute available to run the collector. We don't have to maintain a server or licensing or any of that other nonsense for the collector.

The initial setup was incredibly easy and easy to follow. They have a guide with very detailed and in-depth instructions for how to proceed. They also have detailed, in-depth instructions for every device on my network and how to get it talking to the Auvik collector. They provide very verbose, detailed instructions for how to make the tool work with a multitude of products.

For example, we had a WatchGuard device that was not communicating properly. I was able to go to the Auvik knowledge base, read through their troubleshooting article, and resolve it with some simple steps that they had documented.

For our implementation, it took maybe three minutes, after the collector code was implemented, until the network started to populate.

We have it deployed for multiple departments and multiple teams with a single location and a site-for-site VPN to another location. We have the collector installed on a VM in a Windows Server environment. It's connected to our switches and pulls through all the data.

With my previous company, we saw time to value within six months. With my current company, we're looking at closer to a year or a year and a half to break even with an investment in Auvik, but that's because of the clients we're working with.

Auvik is probably one of the more expensive options on the market for what it does. But if, as a managed services provider, you are working with clients that have large networks with large numbers of network devices, you can find efficiency to be gained that will make that value up.

It's been a harder sell for my current company because we are a very small MSP, and I don't know if we're going to be able to afford it overall. I know that the value is there, but when you have smaller clients that can't afford an extra few dollars a month, maybe it's not the right tool for them.

I think that Auvik is perfectly suited for a mid-range business model where there are many network devices or many networks that are segmented and connected in different locations. There is a ton of value in that scenario. Or, if you don't have a good inventory tool, the fact that Auvik builds that inventory has been really huge for our team. It cuts down on what tasks need to be done and allows for true transparency and knowing, 100 percent, that we have everything inventoried. We don't ever have to question what we see on Auvik, we know it's accurate every time. And that has helped us increase our billables because, before, we would have network devices that weren't being detected, but we were supporting them and not billing for them. Depending on your model for your managed services, there might be some ways to increase your billings.

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing Auvik. That was mostly because Auvik was already in that magic quadrant. We just picked the tool and ran with it because we needed to be fast. We didn't have the luxury of time, we had to make a decision promptly.

Auvik's network visualization is intuitive to somebody whose job it is to work in that environment. It is not intuitive to someone who is a C-level executive. I would not want them to be looking at the tool. It's highly technical data. When you are a technical person you get the information you need. But if you're not technical, it's too much data. Don't use it as what you're going to present to a C-level. Use it to fix the problems and then make a different diagram to hand out to C-levels.

We have not leveraged a lot of the automation functionality within Auvik. We have not been able to use the tool to its fullest extent. We're gaining in that we can easily get the information we need, but we haven't leveraged the automation.

We use Auvik to monitor our client's infrastructure. It gives us real-time visibility into the devices, their status, and their availability at the device and interface level. Auvik monitors bandwidth utilization, TPU utilization, RAM, memory utilization, etc.

Auvik is deployed in a mesh environment consisting of five locations and the data center. We'll be moving toward Azure, but I'm not sure how well Auvik could cover us in that space.

It gives our customers a clearer view of their infrastructure and critical network points, which is visualized in a nice diagram on the website. The visualization part is really cool. It gives you an overview of the entire network at a glance. 

It's a crucial tool for helping our IT team to monitor remote and distributed networks. We couldn't visualize what's out there without it. We have data centers here and there and a couple of branches. We could see they are all connected and working, but we would not have a clue about the infrastructure underneath. Visualizing this helps us to understand what we have today. We know where to look or troubleshoot.

Auvik has an excellent scanning tool for our device inventories. It helps to have everything in one place. It saves time. Otherwise, we would need to ask around or check spreadsheets. Monitoring tools, in general, decrease the time of the resolution. Auvik performs about as well as other monitoring tools. They all do the same thing.

Auvik's features for monitoring device availability and bandwidth utilization have greatly helped us. From a cybersecurity perspective, bandwidth utilization tells us if we have a potential data exfiltration incident. It also helps us decide whether to increase the bandwidth for one of the links or if the current bandwidth is sufficient.

The interface is simple and efficient. You can quickly figure out where the icons and patterns you need to click to find information from Auvik. The ease of use is crucial because we log into Auvik four times a week. Having a single integrated platform simplifies the solution big time.

We're having difficulties with Auvik's regular maintenance windows. They do the maintenance on the cloud side, which affects the on-prem collectors that gather the logs from the different network assets. 

When they have the maintenance window on the cloud, we do not have visibility of the network assets on-prem. I've read a support ticket regarding this, but there hasn't been a solution.

We have been using Auvik for more than three years.

It is very stable. We haven't seen an issue at all, except for the maintenance windows they have every couple of weeks.

I believe Auvik is capable of scaling up. I haven't tried it but I think it is ready because they have the scanning tool. Once we add a new device or a new subnet to be monitored, it would definitely scan it and add the discovered devices on the spot.

I rate Auvik support 10 out of 10. They responded exceptionally well when I needed them.

Positive

SolarWinds has an umbrella solution where you need to subscribe or purchase modules to get different features. However, we bring all of these under Auvik once we subscribe to the service. It wasn't a SaaS platform like Auvik. The company decided to switch for business reasons. 

We've definitely seen a return. Keeping your infrastructure monitored increases the uptime of the network. It tells you if you will have a problem up ahead. We used it to manage an issue in the past where one of the devices had high memory utilization. Auvik helped us identify the moment that memory utilization started to increase. That increased the ROI from a customer perspective.

Auvik has a reasonable subscription model.

I rate Auvik nine out of 10. It's a tool that's accessible to techies and businesspeople alike. It grabs the information out of the network, visualizes it, and keeps the history of everything that goes on, which is beneficial for real-time and forensic monitoring. 

We use it as our network management tool and configuration backup utility.

It's made us a lot more aware of the network side. A lot of MSPs traditionally have been more server/workstation oriented, with some firewall-related activities, but when you bring in the network, it allows you to bring all that full circle and troubleshoot network issues more easily. And in the same way that a backup is important for a server, a backup is important for a switch or a firewall. If you lose one of those, you don't want to have to rebuild from scratch. Auvik provides that configuration backup.

The configuration backup has helped reduce repetitive tasks. With network, there's not as much daily touch as there is with PCs. The automation has primarily been around backing up devices and alerting on down devices.

It has also helped with visibility into remote distributed networks. As an MSP, most of our customers are remote networks for us. Auvik allows us to manage their networks, whether they're local or in the UK or anywhere else. We're able to manage those networks much better via this tool. It helps our network engineers focus on those networks.

In addition, it helps keep device inventories up to date. That aspect helps a lot because people don't have to always worry about whether somebody added a switch or an access point. It scans each day and sees new devices. While that doesn't save us time on a recurring basis, whenever we need to provide a report, we don't have to manually gather the information. We're able to print it out and provide it, rather than having to do manual counts. But that's on-demand and not frequent.

We have absolutely seen a reduction in our mean time to resolution for network issues, using Auvik. For instance, if an alert comes through that a server is down, and we're also getting information that a switch or a firewall is down as part of that, we immediately know we don't need to troubleshoot the server. The server is down because those network devices are down. It allows us to get right to where the problem is, versus having to work our way back and that cuts out a lot of troubleshooting time.

If we get an alert that an AP is down and a firewall is also down, it may just be that the AP is not able to report back because the firewall is not up to allow it to. That's where it saves us a lot of time. It allows us to look at root cause better. When you're looking at that map and you see three things with red alert banners on them, you know which one is the closest point out to the internet and that you need to look there first, versus what's behind it.

The network management piece has been the most advantageous. First, it alerts us about network devices that are under duress or having issues. Second, it has historical data. That allows us to go back, if, for instance, a switch is having problems, and see if it is something that trends at a certain time of the day or a certain day of the week.

For what we use it for, Auvik provides us with a single integrated platform because it ties into their ticketing system. That is very important. The more touchpoints that people have to interact with, the less likely they are to interact. Trying to get it down to as few panes of glass as possible becomes an important piece. We previously used multiple applications for managing our network, and switching to Auvik has saved our organization a good bit of time, day-to-day. It has saved us the equivalent of half an FTE.

It's also the best that we have found for helping to visualize network mapping/topology. It does a great job of that, hands-down. The mechanism that it uses to learn about the network seems to be more robust than some of the others. The interface is very clean and sleek. It discovers devices well and the relationships between them, and the general aesthetic of the portal presents that information. It gathers more data than most and it presents it wrapped up in a really pretty way. Others can draw out a diagram, but they're just not as elegant as Auvik.

The network visualization is intuitive. It classifies devices accurately and presents the links and the relationships well. Plus, if something isn't discovered the way you think it should be, it gives you the ability to manually adjust it. For example, sometimes wireless bridges don't really present well. They don't show a link between them. You have the ability to go in and make that association manually so that it presents correctly on the map.

I've been using Auvik for a little over three years.

The stability is strong. They announce maintenance well in advance and it's not frequent. We haven't had many issues. I don't recall that it just went down all of a sudden. Typically, it's only down around maintenance windows.

It scales well. We've put large networks on it.

The solution's technical support is good. We didn't have to interact with it a lot, but when we did, they were able to answer the questions.

Positive

We used PRTG from a German company called Paessler, but it did not provide configuration backup, so we used a different application to provide the configuration backup. We had to use two products to do that function before. That was part of the reason we switched to Auvik. Bringing everything into one application, and that application being able to integrate with our ticketing system, were the two big reasons.

The initial setup was very straightforward. If you have intermediate networking skills you will be comfortable doing it.

We were able to implement Auvik out-of-the-box, meaning it was immediately available for use without intervention. When we signed up, we were able to download the agents to put on each remote site and begin scanning and gathering data. Once we decided to go with Auvik, we were instantly able to go with it. Within 15 minutes, after the Auvik code was implemented, our network mapping began to populate. 

Within about an hour or two, depending on the size of the network, the map was pretty well displayed. For larger networks—we have some networks that are 1,000 nodes—it might take several hours for it to scan, discover, and learn the relationships. It asks you to authorize networks that it finds. You may initially tell it to scan a network, but based on that network being scanned and the devices on it, it learns that there are other subnets out there. You have to approve those for it to scan them as well. That's why larger networks could take several hours and up to a day or so.

We did it all in-house and it required three people. They were primarily split up between

• networking components: switchers, routers, and wireless infrastructure
• server/workstation infrastructure
• integrations, such as ticketing.

Auvik helps us, but as I mentioned, it's a lot more for point-in-time needs. If a switch is down and we need to get information on the alert and possibly pull the backup to put on a replacement device, or if somebody needs an inventory, we can pull a report. Those are very moment-oriented. 

I can't talk about time-to-value over days, months, or years, but once you set it up, it takes care of itself. It scans the network for new devices. Once you stand the product up and have it connected to your ticketing system, it's just a matter of using it when you need to use it.

Auvik is not cheap. They've done a great job, it's a developed product, but you pay for it. When you compare, it's definitely in the upper tier of pricing.

Auvik has two price points. One is their Essentials license, and the other is their Performance license which includes flow data. 

For example, you may have a network with 10 switches and a firewall, and you really only want flow data going through the firewall. Auvik requires you not only to put the device you want under a Performance license, but all of the other network devices that are billable devices have to go to that same Performance license. It gets expensive in a hurry, so we haven't taken a Performance license with them for that main reason. If we need to do flow data, we'll use a different product. I wish they allowed you to only license the devices you needed to have Performance.

We looked at Traverse Network from Kaseya. It was very similar to Auvik in terms of capabilities, but we thought Auvik was more polished. It seemed to be further down the road as far as how well it had been implemented.

And Auvik's cloud-based solution, when compared with on-prem network monitoring solutions, is better. It's hard to monitor something on the network locally because if you lose your internet connection, it can't report out, which is pretty important. That's why we like it more than on-premises solutions.

It's an easy user interface to work with. They've done a good job with the GUI and how to navigate it. That's not of huge importance to us because a lot of us have been doing network management for close to two decades. That means we've used a lot of tools and we are very familiar with them. But for entry-level techs, it's easier because they can do some things without knowing a lot of what we've had two decades to learn. It makes people with less experience much more comfortable using it.

The solution's automation hasn't had that much of an impact because a lot of our frontline people don't have to interact with it on a daily basis. They use it for point-in-time troubleshooting. It's not a huge help on that side. It's mainly the networking engineers, who would have to do things through other systems manually, whose time is saved.

From a product perspective, it's a 10 out of 10. It's just that you pay for the product. It costs a lot compared to others.

The biggest issue is that if you need NetFlow, where you can actually see more information about the packets that are traversing the network, you probably need to work through your cost model first. Auvik is not going to be the cheapest out there, not even close. It's going to be, by far, the more expensive solution. If that is a strong need of yours, it may not be the best solution. It does NetFlow really well, just like everything else it does. It presents it well. But the pricing model makes it a very expensive proposition to do the Performance licenses.

We use it for monitoring our entire network. We head off a lot of problems with some early alerting on either storage or high utilization, thus we can get in front of problems before anybody notices. We have the solution tied into our help desk system so the alerts open up help desk tickets, then the guys look at it from there. We use it for troubleshooting devices that are not reachable. We also use it for backing up our firewalls and logging into all of our network equipment.

It has cut down on some of our major issues. We are very reliant on our printers, printing title documents, etc. The early alerting on those printers, i.e., when they are having a problem, has been enormous. For example, if somebody has a closing going on, we can avoid them having issues with printers.

The solution helps us put out fires before people or end users even know there is a problem.

The solution automatically updates network topology. The network topology has been great, not only just for troubleshooting things, but also for training. I can show newer or not-so-experienced guys what a network looks like from the top down. Also, we have used the network diagrams for our audits, where we just kind of print it out and hand it to them. It satisfies all of those requirements.

The automation of network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. We have our map up on a board in the office.

The alerting is the most important feature. 

Once it is set up, it is very easy to use.

Its network discovery capabilities are awesome.

TrafficInsights has given us better visibility. In the past, the TrafficInsights feature has helped show us where our system is experiencing performance issues. We have had high firewall utilization reported, and it appeared as, "These are the traffic insights that you are asking about." We had some high firewall usage issues. We were able to take it down to a single device that was copying files that it shouldn't have been at the time. We were able to find that using the TrafficInsight dashboard.

A room for improvement would be integration with our help desk system.

At my company, we have been using Auvik for a year. Personally, I have been using it for three years.

Stability has been great.

The maintenance requirement is just adding new devices and occasionally configuring a new appliance that it doesn't recognize, such as giving it a name. There is a lot less maintenance with this solution compared to other solutions that I have used.

Its scalability is good. There are no issues with it. We have Auvik loaded on everything.

There are four of us who work with it. I pretty much handle the maintenance of the solution. They tell me what needs to be done, then we kind of do it together. They are mostly just in Auvik looking at the alerts, etc.

The technical support has been fantastic. We used them a lot in the beginning. Recently, we have not used them as much. We use them now for adding a new site, which was a billing question. The technical support has been able to quickly answer everything that we have sent to them.

It was a straight-up replacement for PRTG. We switched to Auvik for the ability to do the network mapping as well as the ease of using the network mapping. Switching solutions didn't save us money on licensing, though. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took three months from the beginning to have it running the way it is right now.

The setup time for this solution is similar to other solutions that I have used or evaluated.

It took some assistance from Auvik's support desk, but it was easy to set up.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution for the issues that it alerts us on.

Auvik provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups. We didn't have to do anything. It was all out-of-the-box. The automation of the backups saves us an hour a device. We were backing up once a month previously, and that took about half an hour to an hour per device. We have about 30 devices. So, it has saved us approximately 15 hours a month because we don't have to do this manually anymore. It is saving us about $18,000 to $20,000 a year.

Easily, within the first few months, you will start getting your money back. It has saved us a lot more than it cost us.

The pricing is in line with everybody else, but you get so much more. 

Auvik is billed by network device. They bill our firewalls and networks. However, there are devices that are not subject to billing in our environment, such as PCs, phones, and printers.

We did look at other solutions. We looked at PRTG's newer solution and HPE's native solution. We went with Auvik because of the network mapping and its ease of use. I also have experience using it from a previous job.

When you are stuck, I would recommend using Auvik support or their professional services, which are very good. It makes life so much easier.

Auvik TrafficInsights shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption, but this is not critical for us.

In the network monitoring world, the solution is 10 out of 10. It is the best.

We use Auvik to monitor our entire network infrastructure from wireless to our firewalls, servers, and switches.

Before Auvik, we would check each system independently, which was time-consuming, and some things weren't being monitored at all. Auvik allows us to easily monitor our systems without devoting much time and personnel to monitoring. We haven't used it long enough to realize the full benefits of the platform, but we see the potential. 

Auvik's email alerts are convenient because we're always monitoring email, and it's easier to receive the alerts in your inbox. 

We schedule backups in the middle of the night, and a high volume of data passes through our networks during those backups because it backs up everything for a couple of hours. That generates alerts in Auvik's monitoring systems saying that these network ports are at 99 percent utilization because they're being maxed out. 

I'd like to have a way to mute alerts during these hours. There's no way to whitelist this activity within a set period. I want to be able to tell Auvik not to send me alerts about high utilization on these ports between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

While the web interface is somewhat easy to use, it was hard to find a few things. I would rate the interface seven out of 10. We had to reinstall the monitoring software on some of those machines, and it didn't work, so we had to do everything manually with no UI. 

I would rate the network map five out of 10. It didn't draw everything exactly out correctly. The textual representation of the network map was more useful than the graphical view.

I have been using Auvik for about 15 days.

We've had no issues with instability so far. 

Auvik is pretty scalable because you can have as many devices and monitors installed at locations as you want. We haven't experienced any availability issues. 

Auvik is deployed on-premises, but some things are monitored remotely at different locations. The initial deployment was very easy. We installed the software and entered the credentials. Something did go wrong when we were installing it at an off-site location. The software wasn't connecting to their system, so we had to uninstall and reinstall everything manually. That site was a bit more difficult, but the installation at the main site was straightforward. 

I like that you only have to pay for a minimum of five systems with an account, and you can monitor server software for free. Auvik only charges for certain devices, such as firewalls, switches, etc. That pricing model works out nicely for us. You don't need to pay for everything. You could have five switches and 100 computers, but you don't pay to monitor the computers. There are seven categories of devices that you need to pay for, and the rest are free. 

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. My advice to new Auvik users is to make a network map ahead of time to ensure it discovers all of your devices. It may discover 50 devices when you know you have 60. It could be that some IPs weren't scanned or it is missing some credentials. It helps to have something you can use to check. 

I'm a technical team lead managing other engineers and specialists for several clients. I utilize Auvik for strategic discussions, escalations, and support tickets. I'm on the backend trying to coordinate responses to outages, feature requests, etc. 

We use multiple applications to manage our network. Auvik is our network mapping and discovery tool that creates alerts in our ticketing system. We use ConnectWise Automate and that suite of products for ticketing. It's not like Auvik is a ticketing help desk system with remote control, but it can do just about everything from a monitoring standpoint. We still use AppNeta for board mirroring or finding latency in network traffic.

Auvik is a total package for network discovery that completely meets our needs as a company. I don't see us leaving Auvik for some other network discovery tool. It's a one-stop shop where we can dive into each of our client's networks, and we have quite a few. I don't know precisely how many we have. It's fewer than a hundred, but it's too many to do LAN diagrams in Visio. 

The solution has reduced repetitive low-priority tasks because it collects the SNMP information for us and alerts us when servers go offline. We can see connectivity in the network from a bird's eye view without the need to dive into the firewalls and switches. Auvik saves us from having to create manual diagrams, and I can export all the data about a client's network, so I don't have to gather all of that myself.

Given our number of clients, we would probably need another full-time engineer if someone had to keep track of all of this on their own. It's roughly equivalent to a human working full-time for an entire year. That's one less person we need for all that, and Auvik reduces human error. 

The visibility Auvik provides is critical because it's part of our onboarding process, giving us a high-level overview so long as the client doesn't change the SNMP default values. We can immediately see what a new client is working with as soon as we get off again into their network.

Auvik has improved the team's availability by about 75 percent. Before Auvik, we used a different tool to scan, but it provided only a one-time snapshot of the network, whereas Auvik provides mapping in real-time. 

It's probably one of the first tools we introduce to new hires in our network operations center. Auvik is intuitive and offers hints. You can type a vendor name or an IP, and it's immediately accessible at a high level. Of course, there's depth to the product that takes time to develop. Junior engineers can quickly get a look at it, start learning how SNMP works, or configure it on devices and watch them appear in Auvik.

We use Auvik when we're doing strategic planning for clients. It helps us find servers, hosts switches, correct serial numbers, etc., so we can do warranty lookups and that sort of thing. It's important. We primarily use it for information gathering to see a visual network diagram mapping and get tickets.

It's hard to say that one feature is my favorite, but I like Auvik's ability to map networks using SNMP. It maps the network, so I can look at all the devices and set them to provide alerts or automatically create tickets when outages occur. If clients need it, I can export all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

The monitoring and management functions are easy to use. The network visualization is also intuitive. Ease of use is crucial because many of our help desk specialists and entry-level people need to navigate the solution, so it's vital to have simplicity in standard high-level searching. A single integrated platform is essential to stay in line with our best practices.

The search could be slightly more intelligent. If I type in "Dell" and put an extra "L," Auvik doesn't give a suggestion, "Did you mean 'Dell?'" I have to fix that. That's a minor thing.

Also, if I select a specific device and apply it as a search filter, it shows me the device, and I have to click on it to see it at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, it just stays on the discovery. When I close the device, it remains on the switch displaying the diagram. I have to click the home dashboard to get back to the way it was.

When I remove the filter, it should take me back to the home dashboard. After I add a filter, select a device, and apply it as a search filter, I think it should pop up if there's only one. When there's only one device in the filter, I find it somewhat annoying to need to click it to dive into that device. If I remove the filter, I would prefer it return to the home dashboard. It's a minor irritation at times.

I've used Auvik for more than five years, close to eight. 

Auvik is solid. I have never experienced an outage. Auvik has downtime, but they provide notice well in advance. The maintenance window tends to be at times that won't impact me. The most recent maintenance window was on Dec. 3 at 7:00 AM Eastern, which is 4:00 AM Pacific, so it didn't affect me at all.

I don't see a limitation to the scalability.

Before the company adopted Auvik, I used Visio to create my online diagrams by hand.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but deploying the collectors is easy. Another person handles the onboarding process, but the network maps are populated within a day or so. I've never heard anyone say, "Hey, it's taking a long time for Auvik to get going." They say Auvik is up, and I see the map is there. 

I rate Auvik 10 out of 10.